In January 2018, the Swiss government’s decision to tighten naturalisation law entered into force. With its new law, Switzerland followed a European trend in introducing more stringent “civic integration” requirements, while liberalising access to citizenship in terms of residence duration requirements and dual citizenship toleration.

In June, the US government set up a new office of the U.S. government agency that oversees immigrants’ applications for naturalisation, aimed at identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship. The US bid to find citizenship cheaters is part of a broader trend, whereby governments strip citizenship from those they deem “terrorists” or otherwise undesirable, including the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia. The government of Germany is currently considering the introduction of similar measures.

The amendment to the Portuguese Nationality Law has been approved by the Parliament in July. The amendment involves at least four major, along with several minor, amendments. First, the most important change undoubtedly concerns the ex lege acquisition at birth in the form of a moderate version of ius soli. Second, naturalisation has been facilitated by a lowering of the residence requirement to five years and by additional changes. Third, provisions were introduced aimed at protecting unaccompanied minors entering the territory were also introduced. Finally, new provisions aimed at protecting the principle of legal certainty were introduced following some cases that entailed annulation of several nationality acquisitions. Besides reflecting important human rights’ principles, such as the right to private life and to family unity, of statelessness prevention and of protection of legitimate expectations, above all the new law reflects a strong commitment to fully welcome all those who choose Portugal as their place of residence.

These key citizenship-related events point to three features of citizenship policies around the world. First, they reveal how citizenship policy is a slow-moving target. While discussions on this topic are ever-present, actual changes in the legislation are relatively rare and take time to be implemented. Second, they highlight how legislative changes in a country are often a reflection of broader international trends such as the return of banishment through denationalisation of terrorist suspects and the progressive expansion of electoral rights towards younger cohorts and citizens who live abroad. At the same time, these events also show that inclusionary and exclusionary changes of citizenship can evolve in parallel, due to the multiplicity of actors involving in the policy-making process and their contrasting purposes. In 2019, our objective at GLOBALCIT remains to document and explain this evolution and to make it widely accessible to legal scholars, political scientists, and political practitioners.